Girls of the Southeastern Conference

The Southern Accent is dying out. Plantations are being parceled out as real-estate developments. Atlanta is starting to look more and more like Cleveland. And the vodka martini has replaced the mint julep as the drink of choice even where the grass is blue.

When news of all this homogenization reached Playboy's offices in Chicago, a call went out on the hotline to Contributing Photographers David Chan and Arny Freytag: Go South, gentlemen, and find out if the special beauty of the Southern young woman is going the way of the wind.

Well, call off the national day of mourning. Chan and Freytag found enough beauty among coeds at the ten Southeastern Conference universities to demand two months' worth of attention in our pages, and we are happy to oblige.

It is a Playboy tradition to offer a pictorial on the girls of a major collegiate conference as part of our rite of autumn. There could be no better choice this year than a loving look at the girls of the sunny Southeast. The young ladies of the Old South are now, as ever, engaged in upholding their well-deserved reputation as the loveliest in the country, and we think you'll find their upholding most engaging.

Because nine pages simply are not enough to uncover the Southeastern girls, we're devoting this month to the charms of Vanderbilt, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Mississippi State. Tune in again next month for a collegiate compendium of the spectacular sights of Auburn, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Louisiana State.

In 1932, 13 Southern schools formed an alliance, thus preventing Paul "Bear" Bryant, Herschel Walker and benchfuls of other future football heroes from laboring in isolated pockets of anonymity. They called it the Southeastern Conference, and right away it began to provide the nation with pigskin powers and lovely ladies. The University of the South, Georgia Tech and Tulane have since dropped out, to the relief of triskaidekaphobes everywhere.

The conference, something of an Eastern loop of the Sun Belt, comprises a rough triangle. The vertex lies in the gentle grassland of Lexington, Kentucky, where champion horses are bred and dreams of roses center on the first Saturday in May. The southwestern point of the triangle sits in the steamy lowlands of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where the LSU football stadium is referred to by visiting teams as Death Valley because their hopes of victory invariably wind up as bleached bones left behind on the field. And the southeastern tip of the Southeastern Conference gleams in the sunshine of the University of Florida campus at Gainesville. Between these points lie seven other campuses, some of them sleeping in the hills of Tennessee, some two-stepping to the country music that seems to come right out of the ground in Alabama. But they do have a common denominator, something other places only aspire to: There are a great many great-looking girls on their campuses, as the men of the S.E.C. will breathlessly confirm.

This year, in the interest of science and in its continuing effort to keep its readers abreast of the sexual habits and preferences of the modern young woman, Playboy issued a confidential questionnaire to the coeds at the Southeastern schools. The responses, many of which are gratifyingly descriptive, reinforce the image of the Southern belle as a girl who blazes her own trail through sexual terrain. The S.E.C. girls' nocturnal activities lean toward the liberated, and many of the girls make such activities diurnal as well, particularly at Georgia. Bulldog girls just might be the most liberated of all.

The survey elicited scores of human sexual responses, by masters and amateurs alike, and some o£ the findings are surprising. For example, when asked to name the most important emotional element in their lives, the ladies select family life. Friends and a primary relationship are a full step behind, and nothing (concluded on page 220) Southeastern Conference (continued from page 108) else is even close. When asked what they look for in relationships with men, they make trust a three-to-one landslide over such considerations as companionship, intimacy, freedom, security and "steady sex."

Eighty-five percent of our respondents say they are not virgins; the most common age for giving up one's virginity is 18. Most of those who are sexually active have intercourse a few times a week, with a few times a month the second most popular frequency. One coed who scribbled in "a few times per hour" seems to have been too busy to fill out the rest of the questionnaire.

Three quarters of the sexually active girls have been on the giving or receiving end of oral sex. Nearly as many have masturbated a partner or let a partner masturbate them. Even some of those who say they are virgins have taken part in oral sex and mutual masturbation. Experience with anal sex, however, trails for behind.

It's uncommon, but not unknown, for a Southern coed to share a bunk with someone she first met earlier in the day. This revelation can only add allure to the concept of Southern hospitality. But very few of the girls of the S.E.C. have every had more than a single partner in one bed. Apparently, sexual impulsiveness doesn't go hand in hand in hand with ménages à trois.

Religion appears to exert little influence on the sexual mores of S.E.C. women. About half are actively religious (Catholics, Baptists and Methodists are the big three), but few cite faith as a force in their lives. Several are still virgins because of religious beliefs, and others feel guilty about sex but not enough to avoid having it. One Florida miss says that her church made her feel guilty about having sex, so she stopped going to church. (Trust us, folks. It's true.)

The controlled-substances market looks bullish in the South. Drug users and nonusers are evenly represented among those who sent back our survey, but there may be a few heavy Quaalude consumers who are still trying to find the mailbox. Marijuana leaves are far and away the most popular campus flora. Speed isn't big except during finals week. Cocaine hasn't caught on—students aren't noted for affluence, after all.

While half the girls don't smoke snort or pop pills, just about everybody drinks. The S.E.C. is a real stomping ground for wine, but hard liquor and beer slosh just behind. About 70 percent of the coeds combine sex and liquor, but only a third combine sex and drugs. The majority feels sex is somewhat better when one labors under an influence. Passion while drunk or tripping is described by some as "ethereal" or "spectacular" but by others as either "too sloppy" or "impossible to remember."

We also asked the S.E.C. girls to tell us their most unusual collegiate sexual experience, and those answers will be revealed in next month's installment (our researchers are still trying to make sure some of the adventures described are anatomically possible).

If this brief introduction to the sirens of the Southeast leaves belles ringing in your head—if it drives you to get into your car and head for the Bermuda-glass triangle of the S.E.C.—we can offer a few words of advice: Carry a football under your arm, put a piece of straw in your mouth, drink a lot of beer and don't be surprised when you find some of the most beautiful women in the world.

"Three quarters of the sexually active girls have been on the giving on receiving end of oral sex."